Before the Frost (2 page)

Maria had tried to run; she had fallen forward when they shot her in the back. The girl was in her arms. He bent over and cried.
Now there's nothing left for me,
he thought.
Jim has turned our paradise into a hell.

He stayed with them until helicopters started circling over the area. He reminded himself of something Jim had told them shortly after they first came to Guyana, when life was still good: “The truth about a person can just as well be determined with the nose as with your eyes and ears,” he said. “The devil hides inside people and the
devil smells of sulfur. Whenever you catch a whiff of sulfur, raise the cross for protection.”

He didn't know what the future held, if anything. He didn't want to think about it. He wondered if he would ever be able to fill the void that God and Jim Jones had left behind.

PART I

the darkest hour

1

The wind picked up shortly after nine o'clock on the evening of August 21, 2001. Small waves rippled across the surface of Marebo Lake, which lay in a valley to the south of the Rommele hills. The man waiting in the shadows next to the water stretched out his hand to determine the direction of the wind.
Almost due south,
he thought with satisfaction. He had chosen the right spot to put out food to attract the animals he would soon be sacrificing.

He sat down on the rock where he had spread out a sweater against the chill. It was a new moon, and no light penetrated the thick layer of clouds.
Dark enough for catching eels,
he thought.
That's what my Swedish playmate used to say when I was growing up. The eels start their migration in August. That's when they bump into the fishermen's traps and wander the length of the trap. And then the trap slams shut.

His ears, always alert, picked up the sound of a car passing by some distance away. Apart from that, there was nothing. He took out a flashlight and directed the beam over the shoreline and water. He could tell that they were approaching. He spotted at least two white patches against the dark water. Soon there would be more.

He turned off the light and tested his mind—exactingly trained—by thinking of the time.
Three minutes past nine,
he thought. Then he lifted his arm and checked the display. Three minutes past nine—he was right, of course. In another thirty minutes it would all be over. He had learned that humans were not alone in their need for regularity. Even wild animals could be trained to respect time. It had taken him three months to prepare these animals for tonight's sacrifice. He had proceeded with patience and deliberation. He had made himself their friend.

He turned the flashlight back on. Now there were more white patches, and they were nearing the shore. He briefly illuminated the tempting meal of broken bread crusts that he had laid out on the ground, as well as the two gasoline containers. Then he turned the light off and waited.

When the time came he did exactly as he had planned. The swans had reached the shore and were pecking at the pieces of bread he had set out for them, either oblivious of his presence or simply used to him by now. He set the flashlight aside and put on his night-vision goggles. Altogether there were six swans, three couples. Two were lying down while the rest were cleaning their feathers or still combing the ground for bread.

Now.
He got up, grabbed a can in each hand, and sprayed the swans with gasoline. Before they had a chance to fly away, he emptied what remained in each of the cans and set fire to a clump of dried grass among the swans. The burning gasoline caught one swan and immediately spread to the rest. In their agony they tried to fly away over the lake, but one by one plunged into the water like fireballs. He tried to fix the sight and sound of them in his memory: both the burning, screeching birds in the air and the image of hissing, smoking wings as they crashed into the lake.
Their dying screams sound like broken trumpets,
he thought.
That's how I will remember them.

The whole thing was over in less than a minute. He was very pleased. It had gone according to plan, an auspicious beginning for what lay ahead.

He threw the two gasoline containers into the lake, tucked his sweater into his backpack, and shone the flashlight around the place to make sure he hadn't left anything behind. When he was convinced he had remembered everything he took a cell phone out of his coat pocket and dialed a number. He had bought the phone in Copenhagen a few days before.

When someone answered, he asked to be connected to the police. The conversation was brief. Then he threw the phone into the lake, put on his backpack, and walked away into the night.

The wind was blowing from the east now and was growing stronger.

2

It was the end of August and Linda Caroline Wallander was wondering if she took after her father in ways she hadn't already thought of, even though she was almost thirty years old and should know who she was by now. She had asked her father, had even tried to press him on it, but he seemed genuinely puzzled by her questions and brushed them aside by saying that she was most like her grandfather. These “who-am-I-like” conversations, as she called them, sometimes ended in fierce argument. They kindled quickly but also died away almost at once. She forgot about most of them and assumed that he did too.

But there had been one argument this summer that she had not been able to forget. It had been nothing, really. They had been talking about their differing memories of a holiday they took to the island of Bornholm when she was a little girl. For Linda there was more than this episode at stake; it was as if by reclaiming this memory she was on the verge of gaining access to a much larger part of her early life. She had been six, maybe seven years old, and both Mona and her father had been there. The idiotic argument had started over whether or not it had been windy that day. Her father claimed she had been seasick and thrown up all over his jacket. But Linda remembered the sea as blue and perfectly calm. They had only ever taken this one trip to Bornholm, so it couldn't have been a matter of mixing up several trips. Her mother had never liked boat rides and her father was surprised she had agreed to this one.

That evening, after the argument, Linda had had trouble falling asleep. She was due to start working at the Ystad police station in two months. She had graduated from the police academy in
Stockholm and had actually wanted to start working right away, but here she had nothing to do all summer, and her father couldn't keep her company, since he had used up most of his vacation time in May. That was when he thought he had bought a house and would need extra time for moving. He had the house under contract; it was in Svarte, just south of the highway, right next to the sea. But then the buyer changed her mind at the last minute. Perhaps it was because she couldn't stand entrusting her carefully tended roses and rhododendron bushes to a man who only talked about where he was going to put the kennel—when he finally bought a dog. She broke the contract, and her father's agent suggested he ask for compensation, but he chose not to. The whole episode was already over in his mind.

He kept looking for houses that cold and windy summer, but they were all either too expensive or just not the house he had been dreaming of all those years in the apartment on Mariagatan. He kept the apartment and asked himself if he was ever really going to move. When Linda graduated from the police academy, he drove up to Stockholm and helped her move her things to Ystad. She had arranged to rent an apartment starting in September. Until then she could have her old room back.

They started getting on each other's nerves almost immediately. Linda was impatient to start working and accused her father of not pulling strings hard enough at the station to get her a temporary position. But he said he had taken the matter up with Chief Lisa Holgersson. She would gladly have welcomed the extra manpower, but there was no room in the budget for more staff. Linda would not be able to start until the tenth of September, however much they might have wanted her to start earlier.

Linda spent the intervening time reacquainting herself with two old school friends. One day she ran into Zeba, or “Zebra,” as they used to call her. She had dyed her black hair red and also cut it short, so Linda had not recognized her at first. Zeba's family came from Iran, and she and Linda had been in the same class until junior high. When they ran into each other on the street this July, Zeba was pushing a toddler in a stroller. They had stopped at a café and had coffee.

Zeba told her that she had trained as a bartender but that her
pregnancy had put a stop to her work plans. The father was Marcus. Linda remembered him—the Marcus who loved exotic fruit and who had started his own plant nursery in Ystad at the age of nineteen. The relationship had ended quickly, but the child remained a fact. Zeba and Linda chatted for a long time, until the toddler started screaming so loudly and insistently that they had to leave. But they had kept in touch since that chance meeting, and Linda noticed that she felt less impatient with the hiatus in her life whenever she managed to build these bridges between her present and the past that she had known here.

As she was on her way home to Mariagatan after her meeting with Zeba, it suddenly started to rain. She took cover in a clothing store and—while she was waiting for the weather to clear up—she asked for the telephone directory and looked up Anna Westin's number. She felt a jolt inside when she found it. She and Anna had not had any contact for ten years now. The close friendship of their childhood years had ended abruptly at seventeen when they both fell in love with the same boy. Afterward, when the feelings of infatuation were long gone, they had tried to resuscitate the friendship, but it was never the same. Linda hadn't even thought about Anna very much for the last couple of years. But seeing Zeba again reminded her of her old friend, and she was happy to discover that Anna still lived in Ystad.

Linda called her that evening, and they met a few days later. The rest of the summer they often met several times a week, sometimes all three of them, but mostly just Anna and Linda. Anna lived on her own as well as she could on her student budget. She was studying medicine.

Linda thought Anna was even shyer now than when they were growing up. Anna's father had left when she was only five or six years old, and he had never been heard from again. Anna's mother lived out in the country in Löderup, not far from where Linda's grandfather had lived and painted his favorite, unchanging motifs. Anna seemed pleased that Linda had reestablished contact with her, but Linda soon realized she had to tread carefully around her. There was something vulnerable, almost secretive about Anna, and she didn't let Linda come too close.

Still, being with her old friends helped make Linda's summer go
by, even though she was counting the days until she was allowed to pick up her uniform from Mrs. Lundberg in the stockroom.

Her father worked constantly all summer, handling a case of bank and post office robberies in the Ystad area. From time to time Linda would hear about this case that seemed like a well-planned series of attacks. When her father fell asleep at night, Linda would often sneak a look at his notebook and the case files he brought home. But whenever she asked him about the case directly, he would avoid answering. She wasn't a police officer yet. Her questions would have to go unanswered until September.

 

The days went by. One afternoon in August, her father came home and said that his real estate agent had called about a property by Mossby Beach. He wondered if she wanted to come and see it with him. She called and postponed a coffee date she had arranged with Zeba, and then her father picked her up in his Peugeot and they drove west. The sea was gray. Fall was on its way.

3

The house stood on a hill with a sweeping view of the ocean, but there was something bleak and dismal about it. The windows were boarded up, one of the drainpipes had come detached, and several roof shingles were missing.
This is not a place where my father could find peace,
Linda thought.
Here he'll be at the mercy of his inner demons. But what are they, anyway?
She began to list the chief sources of concern in his life, ranking them in her mind: first his loneliness, then the creeping tendency to put on weight and the stiffness in his joints. What else? She put the question aside for the moment and joined her father as he inspected the outside of the house. The wind blew slowly, almost thoughtfully, in some nearby beech trees. The sea lay far below them. Linda squinted and spotted a ship on the horizon.

Kurt Wallander looked at his daughter.

“You look like me when you squint like that,” he said.

“Only then?”

They kept walking and came across the rotting remains of a leather couch behind the house. A field vole jumped out of the broken springs. Wallander looked around and shook his head.

“Remind me why I want to move to the country.”

“I have no idea—why
do
you want to move to the country?”

“I've always dreamed of being able to roll out of bed and walk out the front door to take my morning piss, if you'll pardon my language.”

She looked at him with amusement.

“Is that it?”

“Do I need a better reason than that? Come on, let's go.”

“Let's walk around the house one more time.”

This time she looked more closely at the place, as if she were the prospective buyer and her father the agent. She sniffed around like a dog.

“How much?”

“Four hundred thousand.”

She raised her eyebrows.

“That's what it says,” he said.

“You don't have that much money, do you?”

“No, but the bank has pre-approved my loan. I'm a trusted customer, a policeman who's always been as good as his word. I think I'm even disappointed I don't like this place. An abandoned house is as depressing as a lonely person.”